Artdoors
I started doing popup art during the pandemic. It felt good to spruce something up, even our gritty little parking space. So while my husband went out to get his braces off, I put up a big smiley on the fence. It was an improvement.
Our new home in pretty Virginia needs no such help from markers and posterboard. But a bird hit the window last week. And why decal when you can paint?
The downy woodpecker that hit the glass. Thankfully he flew away after 30 minutes.
My vision was to issue a NOTAM (Notice To Airmen) about the new flight path.
Mapping out the design in Illustrator.
To do it properly, I needed to know the heading the fliers would take. When pointed at the window, the iPhone compass read 255 degrees or almost due west. Two windows made it easy to imagine parallel runways. As with actual runways, the notation became 25R-7L, dropping the last digit.
To break up the reflection birds find so disorienting, the design needed to be on the exterior. FLAP, a nonprofit that works to prevent bird-building collisions, recommends tempera paint which I hadn't touched since grade school. Thankfully, I found Mary at The Art Box in Crozet who not only entertained my nuttiness but suggested acrylic. Easy to remove with a razor blade, it also came in a wide range of non-Fisher Price colors.
Testing ways of applying the acrylic paint. Freehand (left), with masking tape (center) and a paper stencil (right).
Masking tape was the winner for clean lines. But you had to be patient. Drying time, just minutes in the air conditioned studio, stretched to hours in the late summer humidity. Remove the tape too fast, and the paint would rip.
Masking for NOTAM, minus the curvy bits which would be painted freehand.
Filling in with cadmium orange.
Round 1.
I got the basic design masked and painted in one day. I wasn’t thrilled with it, though. The runway numbers were hard to see. Plus the whole thing needed a stronger sense of motion.
Final choices of cadmium orange and titanium white.
White perspective lines above the numbers suggest a runway. Adding a spiral next to the bird offset the linear elements. It’s also the swirl inside engines that tells the ground crew when they are spinning.
It felt good to own my space again. Most importantly, no new thuds. I know what it’s like to migrate, so I feel for these weary fliers. Hoping we remain incident-free through the busy travel season.